Ars at the launch: STS-135 Atlantis blasts into orbit

On July 8th, NASA launched Atlantis on the final mission of the Space Shuttle …

Go for launch

Watching Atlantis launch was a deeply moving experience, one that affects me even as I write this. With nine minutes on the clock, NASA held the countdown for twenty minutes to make sure that weather would cooperate, both here at the Cape and also at the alternate landing sites in Spain and France. Listening to the various desks at Mission Control each give their OK to go, then seeing the red digital clock finally move from -0:09:00 brought a lump to my throat for the first (but not last) time that day.

The countdown clock, with Atlantis in the distance.

With 31 seconds to go, NASA announced a final two minute hold, to make sure that the vent cap was fully retracted. The countdown started again to cheers, shortly followed by the familiar refrain of "Ten… Nine… Eight… " Standing down near the waterline, beyond the famous countdown clock, our view was of the top of the external fuel tank and the gantry poking up from behind a landscape of dark tropical green.

Atlantis takes to the skies for the final time

This image was suddenly joined by blossoming white clouds, rapidly followed by Atlantis rising off the pad atop a blinding plume of rocket thrust. Several seconds later, the sound arrived. The first analogy I could think of was a washing machine full of rocks mixed over the sound of tearing giant sheets of canvas. Thinking about it more, I keep coming back to "snap, crackle, and pop." It's hard to do it better justice than that, beyond saying it sounds a lot like it does on TV, but louder, with a physicality from the sort of extreme chemical reactions necessary to take four humans and 4.5 million pounds and speed them up to Mach 25.

You have to wonder what it would have sounded like without the water sound suppression system present at the launch pad. As it was, the launch probably ranks as the third loudest display of speed and power I've witnessed; first place belongs to an SR-71 takeoff, closely followed by the start of a Formula 1 race. (And, before you rush to post, yes, I know, I was much closer to both of those and sound levels decrease logarithmically with distance.)

The shuttle went to orbit more quickly than our autofocus could follow

Atlantis moved much faster than I expected; the iconic footage of Saturn V launches in slow motion may have created a false expectation. Within a matter of seconds, the last Space Shuttle disappeared into the cloud layer and off to its final rendezvous with the International Space Station. I don't know whether it was seeing it in person, this being the final flight, or a combination of them both, but it was a deeply emotional moment.

Not as emotional as it was for one of my neighbors, crying with rage. Was she angry that a 30-year program ended with a fifteen second son et lumière? For the rest of us, the tears were a mix of joy and sorrow. Joy at seeing humans tear off into space on a pillar of flame, sorrow that this chapter was reaching an end.

The exhaust plume left from the launch.

There's been a lot of noise about the role of the journalists recently, sparked by articles from Jose Vargas and Mac McLelland. Various members of the press have told the rest of the pack that they have no place being anything other than utterly objective and dispassionate. The enthusiasm of the crowd at the media center pokes big holes in this argument, and it was something I don't have a problem with. It's possible that some of the people covering this launch were jaded with the whole thing but, if so, I didn't meet any.

A week ago, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to write about Atlantis' launch. It was going to be about a trip to watch the last Space Shuttle take its last bow, but also a piece about echoes across time, from the America Tom Wolfe captures in The Right Stuff. An America just beginning to surf the technological wave that would carry us to the moon. Cape Canaveral was the setting for history-making events, events as significant as the earliest cave art or the first expeditions that spread humanity across the islands of the Pacific Ocean.

I had romantic notions about writing of ghosts from half a century ago, of men with thick rimmed glasses, short sleeves, and the serious air of those who understood the weight on their shoulders. Not just the lives of these men—because they were all men, until Sally Ride—but the very reputation of the nation lay intertwined with the fate of the space program. Ars Technica wasn't around back then, but had it been, I like to think that these scientists and engineers would have been our natural readership.

But I didn't meet any ghosts. For that, I'd have needed to take one of the tours from the Visitor Center out to the abandoned launch pads, relics of the space race. Instead, the last launch of the shuttle was like attending a retirement party, which in a way it was. There might not have been cake, but we did get a giant candle.